I met the boys of The Young Electric back when they were playing as The Trademark, and have been shooting assorted things for them over the years, including some of their weddings, ha ha. The drummer Natty is also an amazing graphic designer, he actually designed my AW logo that I use for anything and everything related to my photography, I absolutely love it. When they decided to form this new project, I was excited because we got to take it in a new creative direction from anything we’d done before. We started out in Drew’s garage where the band spends a lot of hangout time together and did shots there, and proceeded to drive out to the salt flats for the rest of the shoot. If any of you have ever been out to the salt flats, you know that it’s different EVERY time you visit. Sometimes I get out there and the salt is rock hard and feels like the floor of a cave, sometimes the salt is soft and has the consistency of cake frosting and sticks to EVERYTHING. Sometimes there’s an inch of standing water that stretches for 10 miles, and sometimes the dirt below the salt deposit is soft, squishy mud…

Summertime is supposed to be the best time of year to drive on the flats, because of the heat and sun drying out the deposit to make it solid. So we took the band van and the trailer out onto the salt, along with my car. As I was driving, I could feel the ground beneath my tires starting to soften, so I immediately turned around and tried to keep them from going any further in the van, but it was too late… the van was stuck! It was a group effort to get it out of the squishy mud under the salt, we had to prop the drum mat underneath the tires and push the van out, ha ha. We shot out there into the night, and actually ended up doing images with the light of the moon, cool. After the boys packed the van back up and headed back, I took my car and had a few “laps” around the flats, it’s a seriously cool experience to get your car up to 95 miles an hour with your headlights off and the windows down driving by the light of the moon. However, I ended up doing a power slide to keep my car from sinking into a soft spot, which put mud all over the inside of my car because all of the windows were down, ha ha. Whoops. A good shoot, nonetheless.